The Most Famous Scroll This Side of the Dead Sea: Jack Kerouac Typed It, Jim Irsay Bought It
The high-end New York auction house Christie’s ran seven sales on May 22, 2001, one of which was “Corkscrews,” the rarest of which fetched close to $10,000, meaning that in all but a few instances the instrument opening the wine would exceed in value the wine itself.
The big deal at Christie’s that day was not, however, “Corkscrews,” or even “Fine Jewelry.”
It was Lot 307 in the auction titled “Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Americana.”
After the gavel went down on Lot 306 — a rare autographed large-paper edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, whose sale price of $70,500 obliterated its pre-sale estimate of $8,000-$10,000 — the auctioneer matter of factly said, “And now, the lot you’ve all been waiting for.”
Bidding on Lot 307 began at $650,000. It quickly jumped to $700,000, $800,000, $1.1 million, $1.35 million, $1.6 million, $1.7 million, $1.8 million, $2 million. At $2.2 million, the penultimate bidder maxed out, and the man in the third row took it at $2.4 million, or $2.46 million with fees.
After “Going once, going twice, sold for $2.4 million,” the auctioneer announced this was a new world record for a literary manuscript. The room, previously rather staid, broke into applause.
Lot 307 was a scroll, 119 feet eight inches long and nine inches wide, on which Jack Kerouac had typed the first draft of his novel On The Road over a coffee-fueled 20-day marathon in April of 1951. It would take Kerouac six years to get On The Road published and a lot less time than that for the book to get Kerouac anointed as the voice of what was called The Beat Generation.
The Beat Generation, and its later spawn the “Beatnik,” took a number of forms in mainstream media, from the exotic image of shadowy jazz-loving poets reading over bongo drums in smoky coffeehouses to the cartoonish Maynard G. Krebs on the TV sitcom Dobie Gillis. The characters in On The Road were more a loose amalgamation of travelers who shared what Bob Dylan would later describe, in a different context, as “a restless hungry feeling.”
Kerouac, who waved off the idea that he was a voice of the Beat Generation and for whom adulation did not counter either his ongoing depression or the alcohol he used to dull it, would die in 1969, age 47, from a hemorrhage made lethal by his decimated liver.
It was almost exactly 50 years after Kerouac taped multiple sheets of translucent paper into one long scroll and fed it into a typewriter at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan that this scroll would become the most expensive literary manuscript ever sold. Interestingly, it wasn’t even the complete first draft. It was missing what would become the book’s last 25 or so pages because, according to Kerouac, they were chewed up by Potchky, a Cocker Spaniel belonging to Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr. (Historical aside: Not everyone believes Kerouac on that one. There is some evidence he ripped off the last section of The Scroll himself because he didn’t think he’d nailed the ending.)
In any case, whether or not Potchky turned literary history into a snack, Jim Irsay said on May 22, 2001, that Kerouac would have been “flabbergasted” that The Scroll was now selling for $2.4 million. Irsay was addressing the issue because he was the man in the third row, the brand-new owner of The Scroll. And, he added, at $2.4 million it was a bargain.
“I was willing to spend a lot more,” said Irsay. “I won’t tell you the max.”
It could also be added that if $2.46 million sounds like a lot for a story you can pick up for a couple of bucks in paperback, Irsay didn’t exactly have to sell the family china to finance it. His estimated worth was recently pegged by Forbes at $4.8 billion.
His worth became his estate last month, when he died at the age of 65. He was most widely remembered as the owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team, but while he was devoted to that team and turned it into a Super Bowl winner, he was also one of those ultra-rich people who use some of their spare money just to buy cool stuff.
Since Irsay played rock guitar himself, he bought guitars owned by Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Eric Clapton, among others. He owned Paul McCartney’s hand-written lyrics to “Hey Jude,” a Ringo Starr drum kit, letters written by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln’s pocket knife, the saddle that jockey Ron Turcotte used to ride Secretariat to the 1973 Triple Crown and the guitar Bob Dylan played when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
With the Kerouac manuscript, Irsay waded into the eternal debate over whether an artifact of that cultural significance should be owned by a private individual or whether it should be held in a public archive. Kerouac’s survivors donated much of his material to several archives, including one in his hometown of Lowell, Mass., and the New York Public Library.
Some, however, went to the highest bidder. Johnny Depp owns a number of Kerouac items, including his raincoat and his last typewriter. Those items sparked less concern than The Scroll, for obvious reasons, and Irsay moved to deflect that concern moments after the gavel came down.
“I don’t view it as something I own,” he said. “Someone else will have it when I’m gone. This is for future generations. I wanted to be sure we kept it in America, for people to have the ability to share it and enjoy it. I didn’t want it locked away in some distant place. I want to have fun with it and celebrate it.”
Irsay would later mark the 50th anniversary of On The Road’s publication, in 2007, by sending it out on an extended tour with an explanatory exhibition so fans and historians could see and read it in person.
The Scroll was not, he said, simply an artifact. It was a window into the creation of an enormously influential literary work.
“My friend Douglas Brinkley, Kerouac’s biographer, said that [with The Scroll] you get to see how Kerouac’s mind worked,” Irsay said.
The text of The Scroll differs in multiple ways from the On The Road that readers discovered in 1957. Before agreeing to publish it, Viking Press required Kerouac, among other things, to change real names to pseudonyms and to modify some explicit sexual encounters. Beyond that, The Scroll shows how, contrary to a myth perpetuated partly by Kerouac himself, On The Road was not wholly the product of the famous three-week typeathon. Much of the narrative was not a spontaneous creation, but a consolidation of material he had been writing for years in the extensive journals he kept on his travels. He also did considerable editing on The Scroll after he finished it.
However it came about, it worked and Kerouac knew it. He wrote to his pal Neal Cassady, the novel’s Dean Moriarty character, that he had written “a really great book,” and a few years later, millions agreed. “He had a huge influence on the cultural revolution [of the ‘60s],” Irsay said. “Bob Dylan, the Beatles. Flowers are beautiful, but the people who planted the seeds had a way of doing things differently. That’s what changes the world.”
On The Road, he said, “acknowledges people who stood and fought for the truth of what they believed in.”
What happens to The Scroll now, with Irsay gone, remains unclear. While he at times suggested he envisioned it landing in a public place, like a library or an archive, the decision rests with his three daughters, co-recipients of the estate. It takes some time to sort out a $4.8 billion bequeathal, not that most of us will ever have to do it.
“I first read On the Road in 1977,” Irsay said in 2001. “Being a teenager in the ’70s, I saw it as about freedom, rebellion, all the things a young person thinks about.
“The excitement of the journey, the search for life.”
